THREAD: Are Schools SAFE during Covid? A Collection of Research, Science, and Data on Schools: Risks to children, teachers, and comparisons within the community.

Sources: Academic, institutional or governmental. I will summarize conclusion and cite link.

Let's begin..

1/

European CDC:

"Investigations of cases identified in school settings suggest that child to child transmission in schools is uncommon and not the primary cause of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children ..

2/

https://t.co/SKIyCVCTsv
whose onset of infection coincides with the period during which they are attending school."

3/
"Educational staff and adults within the school setting are generally not seen to be at a higher risk of infection than other occupations, although educational roles that put one in contact with older children and/or many adults may be associated with a higher risk."

4/
Public Health Netherlands:

"The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is mainly spread between adults and from adult family members to children. The spread of COVID-19 among children or from children to adults is less common."
5/

https://t.co/4P6uWzj5EH
International Journal of infectiousness Diseases:

"The intervention of school closure did not appear to decrease the incidence of coronavirus infection."

(Because its not the primary SOURCE of where it happens)

6/

https://t.co/Lq8bNnKOJ3
University of Dresden: "Schools did not become a hotspot after reopening"

7/

https://t.co/5xsdXhhpAN
AAP: “No evidence of child care being a significant contributor to COVID19 transmission to adults—finding consistent with previous studies showing lack of assoc btwn school closures & transmission rates”

8/

https://t.co/lZcu52PhWN
Gemelli University Hospital (Italy)"

"Available evidence shows School Closures added little benefit to COVID-19 control whereas the harms related to SC severely affected children and adolescents...9/

https://t.co/JalN3BhK8K
This unresolved issue has put children and young people at high risk of social, economic and health-related harm for years to come, triggering severe consequences during their lifespan"

10/
Swedish Public Health Agency:

"The relative risk of intensive care at covid-19 was 0.43 for primary school teachers(CI 0.28; 0.68) (57% lower risk compared to other occupational groups)"

11/

https://t.co/pbv4hHG0OL
Public Health Scotland:

" Compared to working-age adults who are otherwise similar, teachers and their household members are not at increased risk of hospitalisation with COVID-19 and are at lower risk of severe COVID-19."

12/

https://t.co/KSMiHutwzC
National Center of Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH):

"We found no evidence that reopening schools in-person or in a hybrid form increased COVID hospitalizations in the 75 percent of counties that had low COVID hospitalization rates during the summer...

13/
prior to reopening schools."

14/

https://t.co/oLxh4D0ZQA
UNICEF:
"Schools are not a main driver of community transmission, and children are more likely to get the virus outside of school settings"
https://t.co/sMExab3gGd

15/
In addition to these studies, here are some medical professionals/PH experts who have studied schools and Covid and are must follow if you want to actually "follow the science"

@TracyBethHoeg @VPrasadMDMPH @MonicaGandhi9 @ProfEmilyOster @apsmunro @sdbaral

16/
There are many other reports, studies and medical papers that confirm this over and over again. It's not just possible to open schools safely, it's actually already happening. It must happen.

16/
The idea that the CDC's new guidance and a stimulus bill is a pre-requisite to opening schools is a complete farce, and amounts to negligent ignorance of the myriad science and data that say its already safe AND possible to do so.

/END

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
** Schools have been getting ready for this: a thread **

In many ways, I don't blame folks who tweet things like this. The media coverage of the schools situation in Covid-19 rarely talks about the quiet, day-in-day-out work that schools have been doing these past 9 months. 1/


Instead, the coverage focused on the dramatic, last minute policy announcements by the government, or of dramatic stories of school closures, often accompanied by photos of socially distanced classrooms that those of us in schools this past term know are from a fantasy land. 2/


If that's all you see & hear, it's no wonder that you may not know what has actually been happening in schools to meet the challenges. So, if you'd like a glimpse behind the curtain, then read on. For this is something of what teachers & schools leaders have been up to. 3/

It started last March with trying to meet the challenges of lockdown, being thrown into the deep end, with only a few days' notice, to try to learn to teach remotely during the first lockdown. 4/

https://t.co/S39EWuap3b


I wrote a policy document for our staff the weekend before our training as we anticipated what was to come, a document I shared freely & widely as the education community across the land started to reach out to one another for ideas and support. 5/
https://t.co/m1QsxlPaV4

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